by Eric K. Thomsen
In late July 1822, David Marks, a Freewill Baptist evangelist from the Randall movement in New England, found himself several months into a mission trip within the rapidly expanding western frontier. After spending five days preaching near Portsmouth, Ohio, Marks planned to cross the Ohio River to preach in Kentucky.
When the time came, the river ferry was absent. Unwilling to miss his preaching appointment, Marks left his traveling companions and walked alone up the banks of the river. He found an old canoe cast up by a flood. Taking leave of his better judgment, he deemed the craft seaworthy, even though he later recalled the canoe had “an opening in the bottom from end to end, and nearly an inch in width.”[1] Using an old board for a paddle, Marks fearlessly pushed off into the Ohio. Things “went south” quickly (both literally and figuratively). The swirling currents caught the canoe, tossing it back and forth and tearing a large hole in the bottom. In a matter of moments, water had risen within inches of the top.
Just when the evangelist thought he would sink and drown, the canoe snagged in a snarl of floating driftwood. Twisting helplessly in the current, Marks was carried downriver, far from his intended destination. He finally washed ashore (back on the Ohio side of the river where he had started) at a settlement for slaves and former slaves. Determined as always not to miss an opportunity, Marks began preaching. His autobiography records that moment: “A large number, chiefly people of color, assembled, and I felt that Heaven assisted me in preaching. Their tears flowed freely, and my soul rejoiced for the privilege of pointing Afric’s [sic] injured sons to the Lamb of God, who is able and willing to sanctify their wrongs to their eternal good.”[2]
What a story! Yet it is only one of the countless stories of courageous Free Will Baptist pioneers who boldly gave their lives to take the gospel and the denomination into the American West.
Frontier Denomination
Born out of the Great Awakening,[3] Freewill Baptists found a comfortable home on the rapidly expanding American frontier. Founder Benjamin Randall, expelled from his Congregational church for preaching against Calvinistic doctrine, rejecting infant baptism, and espousing general atonement,[4] found himself welcomed by the hardy pioneers who were more concerned about day-to-day survival than doctrinal details.
The nature of Randall’s “new” free will doctrine likely appealed to the adventurous, independent mettle of his rugged followers. Norman Allen Baxter asserts that frontier New England was “peculiarly receptive to his [Randall’s] preaching,” since “the ‘people of the back country, selecting what they could understand of the Christian tradition, turned that tradition to their own purposes.’”[5]
R.C. Gordon-McCutchan describes this frontier growth as “a pattern similar to the one operating during the Reformation: an upsurge in population and a breakdown in traditional modes of social control.”[6] He notes this break with tradition produced the “appropriate religious response” as “social turmoil turned men from trust in external authority to evangelical pietism centered on instantaneous rebirth and inner guidance by the Holy Spirit.”[7]
Denominational growth was not limited to Freewill Baptists but was also evident in the Methodists, another Arminian group established in 1794, a scant two years after their Freewill counterparts organized in New Durham, New Hampshire. Baxter asserts that this simultaneous growth is due “in large part to the essential congruity between the Arminian doctrine of freedom of the will and the rugged individualism inherent in frontier life.”[8]
In keeping with this counter-cultural individualism, Freewill Baptists soon were “intimately involved in the revivalism and social reform that characterized the Second Great Awakening.”[9] They embraced a number of causes, from abolition and temperance to Sunday school and missions, with great gusto, as might be expected from men and women with the fortitude to endure the hardships of the frontier.
As a rule, early Freewill Baptist preachers and evangelists had far less education than their Calvinistic counterparts. “The idea that a man could preach without collegiate preparation was utterly abhorrent to socially minded New Castle or to proper Portsmouth,” Baxter observes.[10] Again, the simplicity of their preaching appealed to practical pioneers who embraced a preferential—if not intentional—anti-intellectualism. Baxter continues, “Sectarian preachers did not possess the cultural advantages of their brethren of the Standing Order, but their lack in this respect was one of the reasons they were better able to reach the frontiersmen. Their messages were on ‘the necessity of a change of heart,’ where the Congregational clergy preached chiefly, if not exclusively, on doctrinal articles.”[11]
The frontiersman, many of whom had experienced religious persecution in England and even in the colonies, did not welcome clergy from long-standing religious traditions but viewed them with suspicion, even disfavor.[12] They preferred men to whom they could relate, and they found them among the Freewill Baptist preachers. Their frontier doctrine was heterodox, though many wouldn’t have known to define it as such, according to Elder John Peak: “These frontier farmer-preachers took their Bibles and began to preach as they saw it would best move their hearers.”[13]
Charles Finney notably claimed he read and prayed over the Bible, consulted theologians, and then just “made up his own mind.”[14] “This is not to say any of these men set out to adapt doctrine to human needs,” Baxter notes, “But, having an acquaintance with both the Bible and society, an unconscious adaptation took place.”[15]
Baxter describes Freewill Baptist pioneer preachers such as John Colby, David Marks, and Ransom Dunn as marked by three characteristics: (1) zeal and energy exerted in preaching and ministry; (2) a willingness to embrace itinerant preaching methods; and (3) lifestyles of hard work that kept them from burdening those to whom they ministered. “They were farmer-preachers,” he concludes. “They farmed when they couldn’t preach and vice versa. It was for this reason that sparsely settled areas, which could not possibly support a settled pastor, often heard the travelling Freewill Baptist preacher as he made his rounds.”[16] As a result, the Freewill Baptists migrated into the west and grew rapidly as they preached “their gospel of free grace, free salvation, free will, and free communion.”[17]
Into the Second Great Awakening
This comfortable interaction with the pioneer ethics of individuality, hard work, and practicality (and perhaps a touch of adventure), along with a strong emphasis on salvation and piety and a willingness to venture deep into the western wilderness, made Freewill Baptists a natural fit for the revivalism (and accompanying fervor) of the Second Great Awakening.
Thus, the denomination became an integral part of this movement that swept the American frontier from 1790 to 1850. Freewill Baptists fielded well-known evangelists and held numerous revival meetings across the frontier. It hardly seems coincidental that the dates of this great revival parallel the explosive early growth of the young denomination. As David Marks himself recalled in his memoirs, some five years after his close call on the Ohio:
My labours, in some instances, have been intimately connected with the rise and progress of the Free-Will Baptist connexion, especially in the western country. And these particulars would now be interesting. The grace which the Lord hath shown me has caused many others, as well as myself, to glorify God; and if the same were more generally known, I believe souls would be benefitted thereby, and glory be given to the Most High.[18]
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About the Writer: Eric K. Thomsen is managing editor of ONE Magazine and president of the Evangelical Press Association. He earned a B.S. in Pastoral Training and Music from Welch College (1995) and received M.A. in Theology and Ministry from Welch College in 2018. He and his wife Jennifer live in Joelton, Tennessee, and enjoy traveling and taking long walks on the beach. They have one daughter, Victoria, a sophomore at Welch College.
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[1]David Marks, The Life of David Marks, to the 26th Year of His Age, Including the Particulars of His Conversion, Call to the Ministry, and Labours in Itinerant Preaching for Nearly Eleven Years (Limerick, ME: Printed at the office of the Morning Star, 1827), 104.
[2]Ibid., 105.
[3]J. Matthew Pinson, A Free Will Baptist Handbook: Heritage, Beliefs, Ministries (Nashville: Randall House, 1998), 21-22. Pinson points to the death of George Whitefield, renowned Methodist evangelist and leader in the Great Awakening in both England and the Colonies, as the “turning point in Randall’s religious development.” It was the news of the great evangelist’s passing that led the founder of Freewill Baptists in the North to convert to Christianity.
[4]Ibid., 22.
[5]Norman Allen Baxter, History of the Freewill Baptists; a Study in New England Separatism (Rochester, NY: American Baptist Historical Society, 1957). Baxter is [was?] quoting Timothy Dwight.
[6]R.C. Gordon-McCutchan, “The Irony of Evangelical History,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 20, no. 4 (1981): 309-326. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials, EBSCOhost (accessed March 30, 2016).
[7]Ibid.
[8]Baxter, History of the Freewill Baptists, 32.
[9]Pinson, A Free Will Baptist Handbook, 23.
[10]Baxter, History of the Freewill Baptists, 39.
[11]Ibid., 37.
[12]Ibid., 35-37.
[13]John Peak, Memoir of Elder John Peak (Boston: Printed by J. Howe, 1832), 19-20.
[14]W.R. Cross, The Burned Over District: the Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850 (Ithaca: [publisher?] 1950), 59.
[15]Baxter, History of the Freewill Baptists, 117.
[16]Ibid., 39.
[17]Pinson, A Free Will Baptist Handbook, 22.
[18]Marks, 5.
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